


Basmachi: The Short Story

by charcoalfeather



Series: The Basmachi Universe [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Idealism, Loss of Innocence, Nationalism, Reality, basmachestvo, basmachi, russian civil war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoalfeather/pseuds/charcoalfeather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Idealism versus reality during the Russian Civil War, from the point of view of an American-educated basmachi revolutionary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The watch stopped ticking and I was suddenly aware of the outside world again. The grass was green to the point of sickliness, the sky a disturbingly brilliant electric blue, the same blueness of the parasite's eyes that had been such a fixture in my life recently. I felt as though I had given birth to this pasture, this singularity without which I would not have been reborn into the life of basmachi banditry. It was here, after all, where the events that had changed the course of my life forever had occurred. 

The wild flowers smelled like roses. Roses. Why have humans associated them with love and the rawness of sexuality? I never understood why sexuality was taken by so many to be an integral part of romantic love. What was romance? When Nurana sat down with me and tried to explain to me many years ago, I could only remember getting confused. 

We had never been close, but I was going to marry her in a month's time. I had to; there had been no other path for me due to my poverty. Could there be any other way out for me? I could not return to America, for Daniar and I were now bankrupt due to a number of past missteps, and isolated as I was from the native Kirghiz community, I felt as if the only way I could build connections and rebuild a semblance of self-sufficiency was through marriage to my childhood friend, Nurana. 

How was our union going to work? What is a union? Marriage should not be a sacrament. Nikkah. In Islam, marriage is defined as a contract for the procreation and legalizing of children. When I went to elementary school in America, I was taught that marriage was about consent, not descent. Consent—yes, both parties had agreed to this marriage. American marriage, however, involves the ever-present indefinable variable, love. I grew up on films like Hearts Adrift, in which both parties in the relationship defined their relationship by the process of falling in love. They married because they fell in love. They had a child because they fell in love. In America, the reductio ad absurdum of all existence must be love. Well, at least to me it is. After all, the idea of love in America is like the idea of democracy—sure, it's nice on paper, but once you get around to applying it in real life, it's utterly useless. Well, maybe not totally, but the idea of "falling in love" does result in a lot of broken hearts.

You see, Nurana and I are not "in love" and never have been. We, as I said before, barely know each other. That'd be fine, of course, since neither of us is American. However, the idea of living with someone you barely knew and God forbid, having sex with her, was a little too much for me. No, I needed my freedom. 

What about freedom, then? In America, freedom is considered a right, as something every human being should have. It's like the idea of love—you have to experience it because it is an innate part of human nature. As the Declaration of Independence said, liberty is among mankind's unalienable rights. Not here in Kirghizia. Freedom is not something that is owed you; rather, it is something granted to a select few. We Kirghiz learned that back in the days of the Uzbek Kokand Khanate. We had been second-class citizens in every sense of the word.

Now, who were we treating as second-class citizens?

Idle reader, I have long been wanting to tell you about a certain young man we had imprisoned here against his will. The son of a Russian official who had enraged our dear leader, Enver Pasha, Mitya had been held for ransom, and I suppose, was eventually murdered at the end of the debacle. It was somewhat pitiable, because the whelp really had no say in this. 

But then again, who gets to actually have a say in life? Americans love to talk about self-determination. Ever since Benjamin Franklin wrote that Autobiography of his, self-determinism has been central to American life. However, is it applicable at all, or is it just like the dreary notion of romantic love, desirable in theory but utterly useless and ultimately a burden in reality?

Just as I was forced into marriage and into becoming a basmachi by circumstance, Mitya was forced by his to suffer an untimely death. How pitiable had it been to see such a young boy sentenced to such a fate!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion.

Mitya, about whom I know nothing, please pity this monster of a man, who remains tortured by incomprehensible, sanctimonious thoughts threatening to overwhelm him. But then, who am I to ask for pity? I was already doomed since the beginning. I knew Turkestan was never going to be liberated; I had known that even before signs of failure had begun to appear. The reason was obvious: it would be impossible to create a Turkestani country through the efforts of mostly nomadic peoples. Nation building had always been the project of the elites of any given country, and Enver Pasha was no different. After all, he had failed to create a Pan-Turkic movement in Anatolia, and it was only after Mustafa Kemal rejected his idea that he went to Turkestan to support the basmachi. The basmachi, a disparate group consisting mostly of mostly nomadic bandits and dissidents, was really an aggregate of pre-political men, people whose livelihoods had mostly depended on subsistence agriculture and herding. The truth was that barely anyone cared for Enver Pasha’s pan-Turkic and nationalist ideals. His revolution was a nation-building project, while the “revolution” of the vast majority of basmachi was merely an outcry against the oppressive yoke of the Reds. Basic survival was the main concern of the people, not abstract ideas regarding pan-Turkism and nationhood so dear to the elite.

I too, was a member of the elite, and as such, I could never have claimed to understand the position of most basmachi. Hence, I was an outsider here as I had been in the West, and Mitya’s presence had only further cemented this idea in my mind. I remembered how his tired eyes had looked at me all the while he had been imprisoned in my yurt, and how full of anger and hurt those blue-grey irises had been. Anger at me, which was totally justified, I felt. After all, who would not be angry with me? I was only masquerading as a basmachi, as I was neither a pan-Turkist nationalist nor a nomad or peasant oppressed by the actions of the Soviets. I was nobody, a fool pretending to be somebody. 

A fool who failed to kill Mitya.

And of course, when Enver Pasha was finally killed by the Reds, the basmachi fell apart. It was so predictable, of course. How could such an organization continue to survive? There was no real goal, no real unification of interests. “Self-determination of the people”—what a joke. The identity of the people had not been shaped yet, but we, the elite, had jumped the gun and attempted to create a nation before nurturing the idea of a nation within the people. 

Ah, Turkestan. It was only a dream, just as meeting Mitya was—perhaps!—a figment of my imagination. Just as there is no motherland to be loved, neither is there a certain red-headed Muse with delicate hands for me to love.  
Love for my country—what love? How could I love something that has not existed and will probably never exist? Nomads have no concept of regional boundaries. Only I, raised in the tradition of American and European nationalism, would have been foolish enough to think otherwise.

So he disappeared along with any hope of creating a Turkestani country. Mitya disappeared amidst the confusion that emerged after Enver Pasha’s death. With no leader to guide them, the revolutionaries split into smaller groups, and eventually, Basmachi became mostly a congregate of bandits driven by necessity rather than any form of ideology. My own followers, Shavkat and Mansur, also left, sensing the futility of the situation. I could not blame them. 

After all, this was the real world. 

 

 

And in the real world, life goes on.


End file.
